


Desire

by hippocrates460



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Harry Potter Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE, M/M, Snarry-A-Thon19
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-04
Updated: 2019-05-04
Packaged: 2020-02-10 13:56:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18661762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hippocrates460/pseuds/hippocrates460
Summary: The one that would have many comments about this being the second time Harry frees a snake from a glass cage, had it been written from Harry's perspective.





	Desire

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you Lilian for everything, as always.
> 
> Prompt: Snape loses his voice from Nagini's attack. Harry really, really needs to have a few conversations with him to be able to move on and put the past behind them. There could be a Sign Language course involved.

The first thing Severus notices when he opens his eyes is how dark it is all around him. He feels for a moment that maybe he is blind, but then he realizes there is light. It is just very far away. He walks towards it, sore and tired, and ends up at a barrier. Beyond it is a reflection of light, as from a hidden fire, but all around him there is nothing. Not even an echo. Snape sits down, and then lies down. At least he’s not cold.

He wonders, in the beginning, if maybe he isn’t in hell. Maybe he was caught by the Death Eaters. Maybe they know, and they’ll come find him. But as time passes and he doesn’t feel hungry, not even thirsty, he realizes something else must be going on. In any case, he doesn’t have a wand, and when he tries to light up his palm, shoot sparks, fly or even hover, nothing happens. 

He counts the seconds with the breaths he takes, and eventually falls asleep. He studies the barrier, and sleeps. Sometimes he thinks, about where he might be, what could have happened, but then thinking makes him tired and he sleeps again.

*

At some point, where normally he would have said ‘one day’ but days don’t exist anymore, he sees something move through the barrier, something small passing between the fire and where it reflects on something. He still only hears his own breathing and heartbeat, but for the first time in what feels like a lifetime something besides him feels alive. He sits up from his sleep.

Smoothens down his hair for some reason. Nothing happens. 

When Snape is starting to wonder if his hair will grow, if his fingernails will, he sees something again. It flickers whatever gives him his light, and he wants to go to it. He reaches for his wand, and finds nothing, bites his nails while he watches, then scratches his arms until they bleed as he cries. He wakes up sore and desperate, his arms healed. His fingernails too.

*

The third time Snape sees something, he stands up and places both hands against the barrier. He has walked away from it, but he cannot walk around it, so he always comes back, only a little afraid he’ll be lost forever in the dark. He stands like that, and is suddenly overwhelmed with light. It takes a good twenty seconds before he realizes he is not dead, or at least not more dead than he already was.

When he opens his eyes, Harry James Potter is standing in front of him, deep bags under his eyes, looking utterly shocked. The light that overwhelmed Snape before comes from sconces on the wall behind Potter. Potter looks up, above Severus’ head, and his face falls. He’s closer than he’s ever been to Snape, and Snape can see the deep green of his eyes. He has lost weight. He’s covered in dust. How much time has passed?

Potter says something, but Severus can’t hear. Maybe he’s gone deaf. He tries to speak, watches Potter not respond to it at all. Shouts a few things for good measure, like: “Go away!”

“You should have died!”

“Is this what death is like?”

With a practiced, fluid motion, Potter sinks to the floor, and watches Severus pace up and down. He feels like a caged beast, knowing there is a world beyond his in some way, and he can’t go there. He can see the dungeon Potter is in now, and recognizes it from somewhere. Is that what Potter’s hell looks like? At least his has flames and fire, Snape thinks bitterly.

Eventually his rage dies, and Potter is still there, sitting in front of the barrier, looking sad and resigned. “Potter?” he says, and Harry touches his ear. Can’t hear him. It gives Severus an idea. He may not be fluent, but he remembers how to spell.

“G-O-A-W-A-Y,” he spells with his fingers, and Potter creases his brow. He does it again, over and over, until Potter starts copying it. When he can do it without mistakes, Severus makes a shooing motion, and Potter laughs. He gets up stiffly, does a few exaggerated stretches that would have been funny if it hadn’t been Potter, and leaves.

The lights die as he goes. 

*

Potter comes back, at some point. Time is not quite the certainty it used to be, but one moment Snape is lying down on the darkness looking up into more of it, and the next light starts flickering from the barrier. He has a big book with him, one Severus knows. He sits down again, so Snape sits down too. There’s barely any space between their knees, but no warmth, no sound, no smells coming from Potter. Who opens the book to the very beginning.

“H-E-L-L-O,” he spells, and Snape waves the sign for ‘hello’ at him. Potter laughs at his own stupidity this time, so maybe he is just a figment of Snape’s imagination. Even his imagination can’t help him, it seems.

Potter is agonizingly slow in looking up words in the book, and ends up spelling a lot. Like: “I know your M-E-S-S-A-G-E.” It takes some translation, but he’s easy enough to follow. He figured out Snape’s message, then.

“Do it,” Snape dares him, “go away.” Potter leafs through the book in an effort to understand. And laughs again. 

They talk a bit, and Potter tells him the castle is damaged but being repaired. Which means his hell must have a lot more detail than Snape’s. He doesn’t mention any people, and Snape decides not to ask.

“What is it like in there?” Potter asks, yawning as he looks for the last word. Snape understood before he signed it, but needed the time to think about an answer.

“Dark,” he tells Potter. Wide-eyed, sleepy Potter. Trusting and so close. “Not cold. I’m not in pain.” Snape’s hands have itched since the first time Potter’s scared tired face appeared to check him for cuts and bruises, to feel his temperature. When he stands away from the barrier, Snape longs for his wand to cast some diagnostic spells. When Potter sits close he wants to reach out and touch his forehead, feel his pulse.

“That’s good,” Potter manages to say without looking anything up. He looks genuinely relieved and Snape wants to say something back, but it gets stuck in his throat at the look on Potter’s face.

*

A few times, especially in the beginning, Potter appears in his pyjamas, red eyes from crying. He doesn’t talk then, just sits in front of the barrier, with his hand against it. Snape lets him stare, when that happens. 

*

“Are... you... actually... a... bat?” Potter asks him at some point, and Snape is standing and pounding at the barrier before he can stop himself. Calling him an impudent brat, a stubborn, callous, horrible child, until he realizes Potter may look scared, he may be leaning away, but he can’t hear him. His magic doesn’t work in here, so he can’t even prove that he is. 

“Animagus,” he spells. Nodding. Potter nods back, but he doesn’t smile.

Snape looks at the book Potter is holding, and thinks about how that required him to manipulate and navigate the castle. He knows that means something, and decides it’s not something he wants to think about at this point.

*

When Potter shows up in school robes, Snape just stands up from where he was sitting and staring at the barrier (not waiting for Potter to come in the least, of course) and walks away. Potter looks at him with a fond grin that doesn’t fade when Snape keeps moving. He’s walking. And his body feels like he’s making progress. And yet Potter is no further away. It takes no more than a minute before this makes him dizzy enough that he has to sit down for a bit. Which brings him so close to Potter that it feels like their knees could touch again. The unpleasant hardness of the barrier in a place that is otherwise surprisingly free of sharp edges keeps Snape from trying to squeeze closer. He huffs, and subjects himself to another stilted conversation.

*

Snape always thought death would simply be the end. He knew as a child that his father’s heaven could not be real, and prayed as an adult that neither was his hell. He hoped that he wouldn’t be aware anymore, beyond death, yet here he lies, staring at the odd reflection of light on stone walls beyond a barrier he cannot cross, with the memory of teeth tearing out his throat vivid and real in his mind.

*

“Did you ever meet my big parents,” Potter asks, sitting in front of Snape with a Conjured tea set like a barbarian.

“Grandparents,” Snape corrects, stacking his fists instead of moving his hands apart as Potter did. He knows soon Potter will have a larger vocabulary than he does. Potter leaves him the book at night, propped open, but that brings him to six new words a day at the most, whereas Potter seems to have befriended everyone that knows the smallest bit of BSL in the castle. 

“They were wonderful. Good, kind people. Nothing like Petunia.” Potter nods solemnly, and seems to process the information.

“Are you done interrogating me yet?” he asks when Potter is enthusiastically skipping through pages again, and Potter grins up at him, shakes no.

“Now tell me, did we have any pets?”

“How would I kno – ” Snape starts to say, but he sees the disbelief on Potter’s face. “A cat. Miffy I believe. I’m sure Bathilda would have taken her in. Don’t look at me like that.” Fond.

*

“Do you hate me?”

“Leave me alone.” He doesn’t, and Snape argues with him. Tells him to explore the castle, to make new friends, and to get back to his studies. Potter still doesn’t.

*

Snape loses count of how many times Potter has come to visit him. He tried to will himself to Potter, once or twice, but it seems only Potter can decide when they meet. Or perhaps he really did lose his magic. He spends more time than he’d ever admit thinking about how fitting it is that Potter’s afterlife has a whole castle and he is just here, alone and in the dark.

When he’s sitting in front of the barrier, cross-legged, laughing while in what he still thinks of as hell, he realizes he’s never wanted anything in his life like he wants to touch Potter. Close the last inch or so, and feel their robes brush. Pretend there’s dust in Potter’s hair (there often is, perhaps his hell is a Sisyphean torture of rebuilding a broken castle) so he can reach for him. He aches.

*

“Is there anything else you need but aren’t asking for?” Potter asks, unaware of how long it’s been since anyone has asked Snape anything like that. The sly grin on his face says now is not the time to say a hug, to be held, just the smallest amount of comfort.

“My wand,” he drawls instead, “some damn privacy.”

“I’ll see about getting you fitted for curtains,” Potter jokes back, and Snape feels his face respond, clamps down on the laugh that’s bubbling in his chest only at the last second. Something in Potter’s eyes tells him it was wasted effort.

When Snape confesses that the sconces only light up for Potter, he gets the unique pleasure of watching Potter talk sternly to a sconce for a long while. He doesn’t even take out his wand, but it works. The light stays even when Potter goes. 

Snape hasn’t been afraid of the dark for a while, of course, and his eyes do get used to the darkness enough to allow him to read the propped-open books Potter leaves him. It’s also rather insulting that Potter got to keep his magic. Still, Snape finds it helps. To be able to see. 

It also means that Snape can see beyond the barrier when Potter isn’t taking up all of his attention, and he knew he recognized this place. Tries not to think about it. The comment about curtains tickles something unpleasant in the back of his mind, and he tries not to think about that either.

*

When Potter walks in with a giant cloth-covered something, the first thing Snape notices is the radiant smile on his face. A genuine smile is rare on him, and Snape’s eyes are too busy taking it all in to even want to know what made him so happy. 

When Harry unveils a painting, its occupant seems to gasp, and turns around immediately. Harry says something to her that Snape can’t quite see from how his back is turned, and props the painting up against a Conjured easel. Explains that the occupant of this painting was Deaf. Perhaps still is, but Snape doesn’t even think to ask about that. Only thinks that this way he can get news from throughout the castle, have someone to talk to, to practice his signing with.

Nabila is a Ravenclaw. Snape tries, he really does. To be friendly, to stay calm, but Ravenclaws just have to be so goddamn _irritating_.

*

Nabila has no patience for Snape, but she does have persistence. A most admirable trait, Snape would say about anyone but her. She calls him _Severus_ without having been invited to do so, and tells him well done when he uses a new sign in conversation for the first time. It’s aggravating. And very helpful.

She’s a deft hand at chess, and knows next to nothing about Potions. Snape doesn’t ask her who she was, or how she died, or why there was a painting of her at Hogwarts, and she doesn’t ask why Potter shows up most nights.

She leaves before he arrives, usually, giving them privacy they never needed. Snape feels warm gratitude spread in his chest, and even smiles at her once.

*

In the beginning, Snape realized that the claustrophobic breathlessness fades as soon as Potter’s arrival is announced by the flaring of the sconces. He knows this, and he knows, too, that one day his relief would be taken from him. Surely Potter will run out of questions eventually. Surely they cannot spend the rest of eternity talking this way. But Potter switches from interrogating Snape about his life and his parents to telling him about the things that are happening in his classes and with his friends as easily as if he always would have been happy to sit and chat with a sour potions master.

Snape learns who lived, and who didn’t. He nods when Potter tells him, and hides his fear, his grief, his anger, until he is alone again in the dark.

*

Hell is rather comfortable, Snape thinks when he wakes up again, stares beyond the barrier to the walls of Hogwarts’ lowest dungeons. He sees Nabila sleeping and realizes it must be night time. Right before he falls asleep again, he remembers again when he last saw these walls. That floor. The door leading to the... He sleeps.

*

“You’ve said that,” Snape tells Nabila, knowing even his signing looks catty. “And I already knew about Flitwick’s flu.”

“You were happy to listen to Harry tell you about the new Potions master getting fired even though I’d already told you everything I found out from the professors,” she throws back and Snape sets his jaw. It’s childish to be this stubborn, he tells himself. To absolutely no effect.

“Also,” she says, “you do flu wrong, that sign means nose.”

Potter and he had both used this sign while they were talking about Flitwick being ill, with no trouble communicating. Potter must have been lipreading.

Nabila tries to tell him that it’s quite normal for two people who are close to have matching signs for things that are different to standard BSL. She says something about families, and partners, and also regional differences, but Snape rolls his eyes and lies back to stare at inky blackness instead.

*

The realization comes as all things do. Slowly, and then all at once. He knew of course that Potter wasn’t really dead, even if he had believed it to be true in the beginning. He knew also where he was, which dungeon he is in, and what that must mean for where he himself is. It takes until Potter mentions it though, for him to believe it.

“... so the book Hermione ordered about the mirror finally arrived and I – ” The rest is just a pulsing of blood and terror in Snape’s ears. He makes it through the rest of the night by being increasingly cruel, and when Potter leaves, his hands start to shake.

He sits in front of the glass of the mirror, and stares out into what he can see of the world beyond. Fears touching it, despite having done so many times before. He pulls up his knees and wraps his arms around his legs, pulls himself in so tight that he imagines the bones of his spine sticking out more and more as he curls in on himself, until they’re poking through his robes, pointing out to protect his weak soft heart. Spines and shells. He cries, and fears Potter will come back, and that there’ll be nowhere he can run. He never quite minded being unable to hide, and something in him burns and aches for a remembered ability to run.

*

It isn’t Potter that comes. It’s Miss Granger. Snape has worn himself out crying, and wakes up as he always does, feeling refreshed and perfectly alright, except for the hurt in his chest.

“He died,” she tells him, slower than Snape is used to anymore, after Potter threw himself into learning how to sign like a true Gryffindor. “He came back, though. I haven’t seen him smile since. He reads books about the mirror all the time.”

Snape tells her very little, especially not that she should consider being funnier if she wants to see Potter smile. He asks fewer questions still, fearing he’ll give his heart away if he does. 

“Be better for him,” she tells him before she leaves, and Snape thinks quietly that perhaps Potter gave his heart away for him.

*

They don’t talk about it – at first. Potter must know that the Granger girl came to see him, but he doesn’t mention it. He sits in front of the mirror for hours and seems to struggle to leave more every time. Snape holds on to the fact that, much as Potter shouldn’t have seen him in the mirror of bloody _desire_ , Granger definitely wouldn’t have, which means something is different. He might still be real. Snape opens his mouth to tell Potter to go a thousand times, and never can make himself say it. He just contorts his face and insults the pale and shaking boy, wrapped up in a cloak and a shroud of pain. Stiffer every time he gets up and has to shake the blood back into his legs.

*

When it’s four in the morning, judging by the way the night sky looks outside of Nabila’s painted window, and Potter hasn’t come yet, Snape leans back against the barrier and picks at his nails. Stares at the inky black all around. Something about the light changes, and he takes a minute to gather his hurt and push it down again, before turning around to see Potter. He hasn’t sat down yet, but holds one hand against the glass so Snape can see it squished and closer than any part of Potter has been to him since he got trapped here.

“Took you long enough,” he signs, looking up at Potter from where he’s sitting on what he’s been calling his floor, letting his face show his displeasure. 

“I want to try something,” Potter tells him, not even signing. “Can you stand up?”

Snape has suddenly had entirely too much of this game, and so he lets his anger roil and show, would spit in Potters face were he still 12 and terrified. “Go away!” he shouts. He sits up to express himself better. “You own all of my time! I wait for you! You have the power to end this, just leave!” He sees spittle flying, and reels himself back in. Draws his cloak around in a show of vulnerability he wouldn’t have let himself have even weeks ago.

“Please stand,” Potter says. Begs. “I don’t want to waste away here either, but I want to try something, and I don’t know what else there is.”

“Tell me first,” Snape says, not quite ready to do as he’s told, his anger not all the way cold. “How come you didn’t realize something was wrong immediately? When did you start trying to get me out?”

“You seemed like yourself,” Potter answers, with a wry little smile. Not a real one. As always, it hurts to watch him fake it.

“It didn’t seem strange to you,” Snape says, slow when he looks for the words he can’t say. Already getting to his feet. “That the mirror that is supposed to show your heart’s desire would show me?”

“No,” Potter looks right at him, great green eyes sparkling. A slightly wider smile. Genuine hurts no less. “Not at all.”

Snape’s breath leaves him in a rush and he leans against the glass to steady himself, flat palm right over Potter’s. Absurdly, he feels Potter’s fingers tangle with his own and a swift pull has him falling forward and the air that hits his face is cold and damp and he tries to breathe in again but it’s all...

*

Air! Blood. Pain.

*

Snape sits up slowly, and lets Potter fuss over his pillows, too scared to fight this. His feet are cold. The air smells like healing potions and Hogwarts. “Potter,” he croaks, and Potter sits down next to him in the chair, eyes flicking between his neck and his face. Fear and worry in his eyes. The bandage is uncomfortable against Snape’s tender skin, so he holds it with one hand and tries to speak again. But Potter flinches, and then Snape remembers keeping his throat together with both hands as he was bleeding out in front of Potter, again, absolutely certain he would die like this, trying to tell Potter that sometimes, in his mind, he calls him Harry.

*

He breathes in his tea with care, Ceylon and honey, just as it’s supposed to smell. Relishes the damp heat on his face. Looks up at Potter, who sits on the end of his bed, cross-legged and absorbed in the book he’s reading. The air still smells of healing potions, but the bedsheets are fresh and nice against his skin, as are his pyjamas. Snape tries to talk and finds it hurts, so he sets down his mug of tea and tries again. Pats Potter’s leg for attention.

“How did you know to pull me through?” 

“Something Dumbledore said,” Potter answers, signing as if Snape can’t hear him perfectly well by now. “When I got the stone out it’s because I wanted to have it, but not to use it.”

Snape snorts, which hurts, but by the delighted look on Potter’s face it at least didn’t sound as awful as it felt. “You want me,” he tries to be sarcastic, and accidentally phrases it as a question. Potter crawls closer, a bit, as if he’s worried to be kicked off the bed. He nods, very carefully. 

*

Severus lets his fingers tangle with Harry’s, and then when Harry pushes his face against him for affection, he uses his free hand to pet his cheek.

“Writing,” he spells, carefully with one hand, knowing by now not to try to speak before he’s eaten in the morning. He has a deadline a week from now for his new book, and Harry knows this.

“Bit longer,” Harry tells him, sleepy and fond.

“Money,” Severus tells him, and Harry just laughs at him. “Food,” he tries, and Harry sits up with a sigh.

“Didn’t save your life just to let you starve,” he says, warm and happy. “Go on then.”

It was a lie really, and much as Severus misses the ability to yell sometimes, on days like this he’s content to whisper, to hold, to kiss and fuck without a sound. So he opens his arms and feels his mouth twitch as Harry falls into them. Kisses his forehead, his nose. Pulls the blankets tight around them both.

**Author's Note:**

> Please leave a comment here or at [LiveJournal](https://snape-potter.livejournal.com/3872070.html), [Insanejournal](http://asylums.insanejournal.com/snape_potter/1802425.html), or [Dreamwidth](https://snape-potter.dreamwidth.org/1127259.html).


End file.
